Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century Fernando el Santo was King of Castile, and his capital was the city on the Tago. The growing nation was strong and full of ambition, while the coming of the Cluny monks and Flemish and German artisans had brought Northern Gothic across the frontiers. So it occurred to the sovereign and his people to erect a primate cathedral of Christian Spain worthy of its name. In 1227 the first stone was laid by the pious warrior-king. The cathedral's outline was traced: a Roman cruciform Gothic structure of five aisles and a bold transept; two flanking towers,--of which only the northern has been constructed, the other having been substituted by a cupola of decided Byzantine or Oriental taste,--and a noble western façade of three immense doors surmounted by a circular rosace thirty feet wide. The size of the building was in itself a guarantee that it would be one of the largest in the world, being four hundred feet long by two hundred broad, and one hundred feet high at the intersection of transept and nave. [Illustration: TOLEDO CATHEDRAL] It took 250 years for the cathedral to be built, and even then it was not really completed until toward the middle of the eighteenth century. In the meantime the nation had risen to its climax of power and wealth, and showered riches and jewels upon its great cathedral. Columbus returned from America, and the first gold he brought was handed over to the archbishop; foreign artisans--especially Flemish and German--arrived by hundreds, and were employed by Talavera, Cisneros, and Mendoza, in the decoration of the church. Unluckily, additions were made: the pointed arches of the façade were surmounted by a rectangular body which had nothing in common with the principle set down when the cathedral was to have been purely ogival. The interior of the church was also enlarged, especially the high altar, the base of which was doubled in size. The _retablo_ of painted wood was erected toward the end of the fifteenth century, as well as many of the chapels, which are built into the walls of the building, and are as different in style as the saints to whom they are dedicated. As time went on, and the rich continued sending their jewels and relics to the cathedral, the Treasury Room, with its pictures by Rubens, Dürer, Titian, etc., and with its _sagrario_,--a carved image of Our Lady, crowning an admirably chiselled cone of silver and jewels, and covered over with the richest cloths woven in gold, silver, silk, and precious stones,--was gradually filled with hoarded wealth. Even to-day, when Spain has apparently reached the very low ebb of her glory, the cathedral of Toledo remains almost intact as the only living representative of the grandeur of the Church and of the arts it fostered in the sixteenth century.